Crisis mapping

Crisis mapping is the real-time gathering, display and analysis of data during a crisis, usually a natural disaster or social/political conflict (violence, elections, etc.). Crisis mapping usually allows large numbers of people, including the public and crisis responders, to contribute information either remotely or from the site of the crisis. A benefit of this method over others is that it can increase situational awareness since the public can report information and improve data management .

Crisis mappers work with data from diverse sources and produced for diverse purposes. As such there is some overlap with big data, international development, and community engagement.

History

A major event in crisis mapping was the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people and left their homes and infrastructure badly damaged. People wanting to help started mapping the basic infrastructure, especially in OpenStreetMap, and then were able to do more detailed mapping as better resources became available. Crisis mapping in one form or another has been used in many crises since then. Many volunteers have also joined to help with data responses to crises and to build new information-handling tools for both crisis mappers and crisis responders in the field.

Since 2010, crisis mappers have mapped events in Libya (refugees), Japan (crowdsourcing and radiation monitoring for 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami), Chile (Humanitarian response to the 2010 Chile earthquake), Pakistan (2010 Pakistan floods, 2011 floods), Somalia (refugees), Alabama (April 25–28, 2011 tornado outbreak) and dozens of smaller disasters and events around the world.

Techniques

Crisis mappers are usually volunteers, meaning they contribute non-wage labor. They can be professional mappers, software developers, data analysts, or members of the public . Since it is a new field, crisis mapping engages users' existing skills, rather than field-specific skills. However, new skills are often acquired during "deployments", where a crisis mapping organization and interface is established to begin collecting data.

It is common to scrape social media sites for crisis-specific keywords. For instance, crisis mapping can include gathering tweets that have a specific designated hashtag.

Crisis mapping Organizations

Crisis mappers are online teams of people, usually volunteers, who gather and provide data online to people responding to and people caught up in disasters. To gather and organize the work, groups have formed to organize volunteers into teams to execute certain tasks. Organizations active in crisis mapping include:

• The International Network of Crisis Mappers
• The Standby Task Force
• Humanity Road
• Crisis Commons
• Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
• Sahana

References

• PBS "Need to Know" program on "Crisis Mapping", May 13th 2011
• Jen Ziemke overview of crisis mapping